Fertility Difficulties

Fertility Difficulties

So much meaning is packed into these words, when a man or woman says them to a spouse. This openness to new life, this willingness to beget and raise children together, is essential to married love.

It is sad, then, that so many couples hoping to have children find it difficult to do so. It is estimated today that one out of six couples will experience infertility. The suffering of unanticipated childlessness is real. Catholic couples may feel this pain even more deeply as they hear the Church praise family life and teach that children are “the supreme gift of marriage.”

In an age of advances in reproductive medicine, many solutions are offered to couples going through this distress. Some solutions offer real hope for restoring a couple’s natural, healthy ability to have children. Others pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of the couple’s marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child.

The Church has compassion for couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real help to them. At the same time, some “reproductive technologies” are not morally legitimate ways to solve those problems.

from the USCCB publication Life-giving Love, in an Age of Technology

Natural Family Planning offers many couples struggling with fertility a chance to finally conceive a child. All NFP methodologies have reported substantial success – as many as 40% of all couples were able to conceive within six months of beginning to use NFP for that purpose.

For those with more serious difficulties, there is a new technology recently developed at Creighton University in Omaha called Natural Procreative Technology ( or NaProTech). They report success rates of up to 70% !

Unfortunately, this new technology is still not widely known within the medical community. Fortunately, the Diocese of Oakland is blessed with 3 Creighton teachers, and an MD who is trained as a Creighton Fertility Care Specialist. All of them can be found on the diocesan list of NFP teachers, or you can contact the Diocese of Oakland (Mimi Streett) at (510) 267-8392 or mstreett@oakdiocese.org.

To read the Bishop’s document Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology click here